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Apple Abandons Web Designers

October 27, 2015

Two years ago, Takethe5th did a story on how Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and the Microsoft Minions did a 20 year continuous shafting of Web Developers. Well, in the Web World times change at a Back-to-the-Future pace. Now Apple under CEO Tim Cook has taken over the shit-on-you toilet and is shafting all those Web Designers and Developers that have shown impressive loyalty to a proprietary brand in hardware,

True Steve Jobs was proprietary right from the beginning in hardware, development tools and software for his Mac/OS and iOS operating system software. But Steve took a cross platform approach on the Web side supporting WebKit browser engine, CSS3 early, HTML5 early, clean DOM, and close to JavaScript/ECMAScript standard. But look what has happened under Tim Cook’s “leadership”.
1)Apple Safari has become the worst browser for HTML5:Two years ago Apple Safari lead Microsoft Internet Explorer by a wide margin in HTML5Test.Now Apple Safari has replaced Microsoft Edge/Internet Explorer at the bottom of the stack.

But the list of Apple transgressions against Web standards is growing longer by the year:
– Apple delays force Google and Opera out of Webkit – see here and here
– Apple barely support ContentEditable for HTML Editors – see here:
– Apple abandons WebSQL followed by Google – see here
– Apple refuses Pointer Events W3C Recommendation, Google follows as seen here:

Rick Byers of Google states: No argument that PE is more elegant. If we had a path to universal input that all supported, we would be great with that, but not all browsers will support PE. If we had Apple on board with PE, we’d still be on board too. The equation has shifted for us.

– Apple supports Application Cache API less crucial audio files – see here
– Apple undoes HTML5 Form Validation because it is only vendor who won’t halt the submission of an invalid form – see here.
– Apple does not support WebRTC – real time communication – see here.
– Apple support for ECMASCript/JavaScript 6 lags way behind all major vendors – see here.
– Apple Safari on Windows has not been updated for 3 years and counting
– Apple Safari on iPad crashes contagously
In general the Web Developer community ha every reason to see Apple as the new Microsoft, stifling Web standards:

We need to stop letting Apple stifle the work of browser vendors and standards bodies. Too many times, we’ve seen browser vendors with the best intentions fall victim to Apple’s reluctance to work with standards bodies and WebKit’s dominance on mobile devices. We cannot let this continue to happen.

from the jQuery team
and

Apple has a very, very strong influence over what standards get adopted and what standards do not. Partly it’s market share, partly it’s developer bias (see, for example, how other vendors eventually felt forced to start supporting the webkit prefix due to vendor prefix abuse).
Apple simply does not play well with other vendors when it comes to standardization. The same sort of things we once criticized Microsoft for doing long ago, we give Apple a pass on today. They’re very content to play in their own little sandbox all too often.

So congratulations to Web Designers and Developer, for all your loyalty to Apple hardware and software, Tim Cook has seen fit to return the favor by becoming worse than Microsoft in proprietary implementations and stifling hard won Web standards.

An American Theme ?

This situation has a strong echo in contemporary America – foisting work and loss on others. Almost all Business Executives that once made 15-20x times the average overall compensation of their employees. now enjoy a ratio of over 300x . These same business executive are holding over $2 trillion dollars in earnings overseas. Just returning one third of that would spark a resurgence in the American economy.of massive proportions. Meanwhile many of those executives are working hard to lower wages and benefits, eliminate “redundant” workers by automation and outsourcing. Wall Street Bankers after getting rescued to the tune of trillionsof public dollars,rewarded that same public generosity with miniscule to no mortgage relief for millions of underwater mortgage holders while retaining most of the executives who committed the fraud. And IT executives at Apple who depended on loyalty of their Graphic and Web Designer/Developers for their survival and the surging growth of the iOS family, now are short changing those same groups with their adoption of a deeply proprietary stance in both hardware, software and Web standards. Thank you Tim Cook [652 x average Apple workers salary]and company.